Welcome to one of the most active flamenco sites on the Internet. Guests can read most posts but if you want to participate click here to register.
This site is dedicated to the memory of Paco de Lucía, Ron Mitchell, Guy Williams, Linda Elvira, Philip John Lee, Craig Eros, Ben Woods, David Serva and Tom Blackshear who went ahead of us.
We receive 12,200 visitors a month from 200 countries and 1.7 million page impressions a year. To advertise on this site please contact us.
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to estebanana)
I’d like to write a longer story now, but I’m pressed for time. I liked your story Richard, I’ve always thought Tangier would be a romantic place with all that’s been written about American ex-pats shooting heroin and ullalating all night. But it’s exactly your witnessing that dancing and singing that makes me think Arabic music has less to do with flamenco than we commonly assume. When I think of flamenco I think of music with key centers like E and A major or F# major, B minor G minor etc. With Arabic music, I think half flatted notes in maqam that don’t work like western major/ minor relationships.
* name dropping alert *
I went to see the film ‘Um Koltoum the Voice of Egypt’ with Hamza el Din, his Japanese wife and one of his music students who is an oudi. This was in 1998, we watched this documentary and el Din-san was around 70 then and had lived through the time period depicted in the film so he knew her work extremely well, despite being Sudanese. ( little known Hamza el Din lived in Japan for 20 years) when I lived in Oakland I lived about six blocks from him and often saw him walking around the lake.
After the movie we went to dinner, and a belly dancer and as performing at this joint near the theater that we landed in. He was perturbed and amused at the same time, it was a downgrade from the vocal tracks of Um Koltoum as the belly dancer didn’t have a group, but a boombox.
After she was finished he showed us some palmas from Arabic dance accompaniment. They were not like flamenco at all. To compare flamenco palmas to the clapping in various kinds of Arabic musics seemed like comparing black gospel clapping to white campsite sing along clapping. 1&3 or 2&4
As for Hebraic mellifluous invention, you find it throughout western music from Haydn, Shostakovich, Bruch, Mendelsoln to Sondheim. And there is precious little that’s derived from Arabic sources, Mozart’s Turkish March? That’s about as Arabic as Nino Ricardo’s Zambra.
You find Hebraic music in old and modern western classical music, Benjamin Britten, 3rd suite for solo cello is built on a Hebraic work, which has a relationship with Siguiriya. Go figure.
And I bet dollars to donuts I could find older references to Sephardic music.
Posts: 15329
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to estebanana)
quote:
And I bet dollars to donuts I could find older references to Sephardic music.
My friend sent me a research about a certain melody, and as I said like 100 year old source seemed to indicate the sephardic melody was in fact a Turkish folk melody. Meaning, a rather recent appropriation set to a specific lyric set. Again, in that case, it was not helpful to me but the idea there is musicology surrounding the topic was interesting, and I took his word that in GENERAL it was pretty much like this, that they can't really track how things were sung, very far back.
When I look at the arabic and Indian music, I see systems in place, as little as I could learn about it, that indicate there are very old melodies still functioning as likely they were as far back as they say, 1000 years or whatever. because they are based on these small modules of info and linked together to produce "classical" mini compositions (song melody to westerners), there is no reason to think this hybridization/corruption of these melodies to have been so wide spread as is assumed by many looking for explanation of, especially the "Hijazkar Oriental fetish of the West", as that guy's video described that I linked a while back.
Also I found a source analyzing the old Cantigas that have mentioned in the past as influence on Andalusian music, yet here again, the words and melodies printed from before Columbus seem to have no relation. Worse, our beloved modal melody only constitutes a 4/100 ratio, ie, just as the Persian guy states, you have to listen to HOURS of Arabic music to finally get hit with the fetishized HijazKar.
I got excited about Zyrab suspected tradition alive in Africa music today, and musicologist have equated the hijazkar they use to EF#GAB etc. Because of the TUNING THING that most like to ignore, the EFG#AB by contrast is smeared out between the two, and an approximation can fall either direction to analogous Western scales. Long story short, neither approximation is a perfect analogy but there is indeed a "fetish" in favor of the aug second F-G# to emphasize the "Oriental" sound, as far as Western thinking goes.
Hava Nagila is from 1918. If you can dig up older research for Jewish melody then the actual jewish music experts, that would help us a lot.
maybe them were the influencers for the Jews (and others)
😂 Jewish culture is 5000 years old and Egypt was colonized by the Macedonians, Romans, Ottomans and British. Um Koltuom represented a nationalist voice for modern Egyptians against colonialism and have nothing to do with Jewish music
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to estebanana)
so?
we are talking about a melting pot .
You can have you own stuff , therefore for somekind of reason put other elements (from others) to your stuff , and others can adopt it also and therefore change it even more.
Very dificult to know who comes first in the melting pot.
You can have you own stuff , therefore for somekind of reason put other elements (from others) to your stuff , and others can adopt it also and therefore change it even more.
Very dificult to know who comes first in the melting pot.
Problem is, Entropy. You don't end up with imprinted formal structure and tradition withheld/guarded melodic structure that way. Hence when we trace things, turns out there is almost ALWAYS, a singular creative event, after which whatever happens to corrupt the original, the imprint is pretty darn clear there is before and after. Think about "fusion" even today. A lot of the mash up music doesn't imprint in a formal way, so you get basically, "failed experiments", or "hits" that people repeat as standards on their own, ignoring the elements that created it. "Spain" by chick Corea is actually a jazzy take on Rodrigo Concerto de Aranjuez second movement. Both coexist now, but hundreds of years from now, who knows.
Posts: 3470
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to estebanana)
quote:
I’ve always thought Tangier would be a romantic place with all that’s been written about American ex-pats shooting heroin and ullalating all night.
The most famous expat being Paul Bowles. His novel "The Sheltering Sky" is one of my favorites. Tangier hosts our oldest diplomatic post. The American Legation in Tangier was given to the US as a gift by the Sultan of Morocco. in 1821, Morocco earlier being the first nation to recognize the United States. Lots of history in Tangier, diplomatic and literary.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to Ricardo)
For Ricardo,
There’s not a great many Sephardic singers left due to the breaking up of Sephardic enclaves in certain countries by a certain religious extremist group. The diaspora of Sephardim goes way back, and spans the Balkans to Turkey, Africa, parts of the Mideast ( Eurasia. Lots of Sephardic culture is an amalgam of what culture they brought on their travels and what they picked up at the places they became sedentary for certain durations of time. Picking on them as a group without rooted song structures is a bit lame, really. And as far as Hebraic equivalent of cante jondo, that’s in the Jewish tradition in spades. My point is, Jewish folk materials fold into western tonic structures better than music from Arabia, and in this sense are probably more prevalent as influences or ancient parts of what we have today in flamenco, rather than the usual claptrap about Arabic roots. The Jewish material goes incognito through western music, whereas the Arabic is virtually non existent.
This topic has gotten far afield in a difficult topic which is hotly disputed and often understood in a very shallow way. It’s probably worth a separate discussion that’s focused on a very narrow set of discussion points, otherwise it just becomes a careening mess of disconnected ideas.
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to BarkellWH)
quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
quote:
I’ve always thought Tangier would be a romantic place with all that’s been written about American ex-pats shooting heroin and ullalating all night.
The most famous expat being Paul Bowles. His novel "The Sheltering Sky" is one of my favorites. Tangier hosts our oldest diplomatic post. The American Legation in Tangier was given to the US as a gift by the Sultan of Morocco. in 1821, Morocco earlier being the first nation to recognize the United States. Lots of history in Tangier, diplomatic and literary.
Bill
I was thinking of him, I’ve read about half of his books, but his wife Jane is very fine writer who isn’t well known enough also. Of course there is WS Burroughs and the whole cool gang of Beats and later rock & rollers, but I find that anti romantic and predictably trendy. When I said romantic I was being sarcastic. Tangier was a dumping ground for European and American artists on drinking and sex junkets, a few of them were actually significant. Bowles’ being two of them.
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to estebanana)
The connection between flamenco and Sephardic music isn’t provable in any way, but the body of poetry song or ‘letras’ in Ladino is old. Unfortunately due to the diaspora being harassed by a certain religion in times before the 20th century and the holocaust of WWII a lot was lost. Probably people who had knowledge of older melody forms. But a large body of Ladino lyrics survive and were collected starting in the late 19th century and in haste before and after the holocaust. These works bear enough structural similarities and characteristics with late medieval Spanish poetry to be considered old, older than 100 years ago.
The Sephardic poetry is part of what made up the body of work taken up by the Troubadours. When I was a Mills College ( now closed and no longer a school) I studied and hung out with Carlota Caulfield who is a poet and an expert on late medieval Spanish literature and poetry. She was at the time the chair of the language department at Mills. We talked a lot about the relationship or potential relationships between flamenco letras and troubadour poetry. She did her doctorate on the subject. Around 1996 she went on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage, part walking part on a bus. I made her a mix tape, because we still traded cassettes back then, which was all flamenco. She said they played it on the bus cassette player over and over and it became an aural talisman for the anticipation and meditation for each way point they stopped at.
Since the Sephardim tracked out of Spain when Los Reyes Catholicos told them to move on or convert, they ended up all over the place, even in England. The melodic information isn’t intact, but the body of poetry in Judeo Espaniol or Ladino has large chunks that are quite authentically old. Presumably the Sephardim took the poetry in their heads and remembered it, but the melodic parts did stay as intact.
Once about 15 years ago I was doing some interior carpentry work for a Turkish couple in San Francisco. They spoke English and Turkish, but the mother of the wife in the couple came to visit for a month. I was in the living room building a custom bookshelf and doing some other things, I can’t remember, when I heard the the mother and daughter in the kitchen talking only to each other while the husband was at work. I paused and listened and I couldn’t believe it. I politely stuck my head in the kitchen and said “I’m sorry interrupting, but I hear you’re speaking Ladino.” They looked horrified, I quickly said I understood what you said because I used to accompany a singer who learned to sing Sephardic songs. They exhaled. I told them it was a beautiful surprise to hear native Ladino speakers. They were like, meh we talk like his all our lives.
Today there are estimated to be less than 150,000 speakers of Judeo Espaniol. At one point in the past in Andalusia Ladino was spoken by a large population. Funny my three half sisters’ father is half Spanish as his mother was from somewhere in Sevilla province. My mom is from a line of people from the part of Ukraine or old Russia where there were pogroms, that part of my family moved to Germany and then to Texas. But my half sisters are part Andalusian and Jewish, so I call them Los Judias Verdes. 😂
They don’t care about flamenco one bit, but they are all morena and have dark eyes. The person in the family interested in flamenco has a Swedish/ English/ German father line. Funnier still what really got me into Spanish culture and flamenco were the cultural remnants and references to Spanish colonialism in southern Californian where I grew up.
When I was very young maybe 5 to 7 years old, my mother and stepfather were looking for a house to buy. We looked at many, the one I liked best was the one they couldn’t afford. It was a Spanish Revival style home in an old part of town. It had big red floor tiles and an arched entrance with heavy old carved wooden doors. It looked spectacular to my budding aesthetic for Iberian stuff. We bought a house on the side of town settled later near orange groves and an Indian reservation, now a casino. I had a yearning for that house and the economic and social benefits it could cultivate in our family and think I held onto ‘Spanish things’ as markers of success and landed security.
So that’s why I decided well into my adulthood to make Spanish guitars and cultivate a tiny bit of an ear for flamenco. Segovia records at the mall music shop had something to with it also. The records in the classical bins were usually less than $3 each, Nonesuch label classical music were often $1! I bought everything from John Williams to Stravinsky, and Rush.
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to estebanana)
And this is all to say that to me, to me, I think the spirit and intent and feeling of Sephardic poetry from the late Middle Ages really has a flamenco thing happening. The Arabic poetry the time does and doesn’t, you see because many of the Sephardic poets were bilingual and wrote in Arabic and Ladino because they were subjects of the Caliphate. But if you parse through the works by the Sephardic poets, there is a sense of longing and loneliness, a feeling of despair and loss that’s not as salient in the Arabic written by Arab poets. The later Troubador poets who developed new materials often lampooned or romanticized the Moors in a mocking way. And I feel very strongly this is the guasa of the Sephardim.
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to estebanana)
Ladino isnt spanish exclusive , its Iberian, you can listen a mix of two or three languages (spanish , portuguese , hebrew) but i would say mainly spanish , to be precise Iberian but closer to what we know now as spanish. If we go behind , so its Roman/Greek -----------» levante ---»middle east
Maybe the closer style that you have "now" is Fado , mainly in lyrics and singing style. Where by the way , almost all songs are about missing someone or something (saudade) or bad luck or a love that ended or didnt hapen .
Although the desert camel cobra Arabian music gave me warm fuzzy feelings as a Westerner in the appropriate moment, you should really read some of the comments that call BS on the entire video including the Genetics part (though the names were really pissing people off! LOL). That guy screaming "muslim is NOT a RACE!!!!", was very nice.
Some one else claiming doing research said Muslim and Jew is really OUT of the genetic picture. 2% or something.
Posts: 15329
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to estebanana)
quote:
But a large body of Ladino lyrics survive and were collected starting in the late 19th century and in haste before and after the holocaust. These works bear enough structural similarities and characteristics with late medieval Spanish poetry to be considered old, older than 100 years ago.
This is interesting. Anything as old or older than George Borrow? At some point I would scan all his letras and came across two that correlate to Demofilo and imply, to me, he observed flamenco proper. So it is not too difficult to try to corroborate any of the ladino lyrics to what Borrow or Demofilo have, which might suggest overlap with the sephardic song. Also I noticed Agujeta el Viejo singing a letra found in both Ocón (Soledad) and demofilo, and certainly he would not be using those sources!
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to BarkellWH)
quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
quote:
I’ve always thought Tangier would be a romantic place with all that’s been written about American ex-pats shooting heroin and ullalating all night.
The most famous expat being Paul Bowles. His novel "The Sheltering Sky" is one of my favorites. Tangier hosts our oldest diplomatic post. The American Legation in Tangier was given to the US as a gift by the Sultan of Morocco. in 1821, Morocco earlier being the first nation to recognize the United States. Lots of history in Tangier, diplomatic and literary.
I finally read "The Sheltering Sky" a couple of years ago, but it had been coming for 20+ years. For some reason he was never published in Bulgaria before I left for Canada(*), so my first exposure to him was when I randomly walked into a screening of the documentary "Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles" around 2000.
Some ten years later I visited the resting place of Bruce and Brandon Lee in Seattle and found a magnificent passage from "The Sheltering Sky" etched on Brandon's tombstone, which affected me deeply.
Brandon was accidentally killed just 17 days before his wedding day to marry his love, Eliza. In an interview just prior to his death, he quoted that passage from Paul Bowles' book that he had chosen for his wedding invitations.
(*) Up until last year only published once, in 1993, and only "The Sheltering Sky" in translation, confusingly named "Чай в Пустинята" ("Tea in the desert"). Only 30 years later were two of his other books published.
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
Posts: 3470
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to kitarist)
quote:
I finally read "The Sheltering Sky" a couple of years ago, but it had been coming for 20+ years. For some reason he was never published in Bulgaria before I left for Canada(*), so my first exposure to him was when I randomly walked into a screening of the documentary "Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles" around 2000.
Some ten years later I visited the resting place of Bruce and Brandon Lee in Seattle and found a magnificent passage from "The Sheltering Sky" etched on Brandon's tombstone, which affected me deeply.
Brandon was accidentally killed just 17 days before his wedding day to marry his love, Eliza. In an interview just prior to his death, he quoted that passage from Paul Bowles' book that he had chosen for his wedding invitations.
Thanks for posting this, Konstantin. A very moving passage indeed. I have read several of Bowles' books and like them all. But in my opinion, none matches "The Sheltering Sky."
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
great thanks! I guess they admit it is hard to trace early sources as I said earlier. For example (I will use footnote indicators since it is a long article), tucked in there between footnote 17 and 18 they describe the spread of phonograph records such that people embrace some melody as their own without actually knowing a true origin. The "de la luna naci" was in fact, the PETENERA example I mentioned. The authors here just say the song is "known" in Spain.
So for my purposes, I would really love to know the sources for the very first medieval ballad, about a group of girls going to church (they say it was a christian source that had taken it from Judeo tradition? I just want to know the sources there), the big footnotes are 14, where they assert direct evidence rather than theory/conjecture about the sources, and 15, where the musical forms seem to have been studied (hoping lots of musical score evidence in that source).
In terms of lyric content, I am getting not so much connected vibes with this content so much as what I have seen with normal Spanish Romances/sources (i.e. not necessarily converso or jewish, but lyrics about love and such) of the 16th cent. Villancicos/Sonettes, etc. The issue musically of course, for me, is the formal structure, where these 8 syllables sephardic songs are a better fit for cante, of course, than any of the villancicos I have yet seen. That is why I need to see if they are coming AFTER the 16th cent, or before it, from some actual sources (manuscripts or print). These could in theory reveal musical structure.
Thanks, I will spend some time with this.
meanwhile, for comparison, a villancico of Juan Vasquez, 1550s (the musical score does not conform to any flamenco palo, and the rhyme does not work as cante neither, but I mean the type of poem is more in line with cante for me than any of those sephardic examples:
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to estebanana)
This is a recent paper from a conference on Iberian history.
What’s interesting is that the more historians dig into Iberian history the more connected the Sephardic group becomes to power centers. In searching for the oldest Sephardic melody, my theory is that these tunes were shared by both sacred and profane Spanish music of the time and the Sephardic authorship or influence was written out or ignored out of the story.
The contact between the nobility, troubadour phenomena and Sephardic culture was less up in France and Germany. Most of the concept of less contact between Jews and troubadour was conjectured based on up north sources. But since Iberian studies didn’t take off in the same way until three decades ago, new studies show relationships were different in Spain. Iberian studies kind of had a big jolt around year 2000ish, before that it was not as vigorously done as historical research on the countries north of Spain. My friend Carlotta was receiving a lot of invites to go to Europe to speak at Iberian studies forums and programs that were filling up with students like never before.
Melodies, where did they go? Maybe right under our noses in the late medieval music in the books like the Cantigas collections of the Spanish courts. This is where I’d hunt to see if we missed something or if the expulsion of Jews buried evidence. Also notable, during the courts of the Al Andalus rulers only 8% of the people in those realms were Arabs….
great thanks! I guess they admit it is hard to trace early sources as I said earlier. For example (I will use footnote indicators since it is a long article),
meanwhile, for comparison, a villancico of Juan Vasquez, 1550s (the musical score does not conform to any flamenco palo, and the rhyme does not work as cante neither, but I mean the type of poem is more in line with cante for me than any of those sephardic examples:
It does have a flamenco sentiment doesn’t it?
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
Posts: 15329
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Real Tocaores drink Zynar (in reply to estebanana)
quote:
Melodies, where did they go? Maybe right under our noses in the late medieval music in the books like the Cantigas collections of the Spanish courts. This is where I’d hunt to see if we missed something or if the expulsion of Jews buried evidence.
thanks for the article. Well, Cantigas I looked into. There are hundreds, and we have music and text. So the the text is fairly irregular, or, not the specific simple thing that relates to cante, so I find it un interesting in that regard. The melodies also, tied to the irregular text, have this irregular phrasing that is equally not interesting. Lastly, I got bored going through it myself so I checked a study on the cantigas that pointed out the percentage of Phrygian melody is 4/100, and the ones I check, again, not interesting in this regard. Considering that low percentage in conjunction with the recent Persian guy pointing out the Western Phrygian fetish based "hijazkar" only appears in REAL Arab music 1/10hrs by percentage, we see that these musical "influencers on flamenco" or even basic Andalusian cadence type music in general, demands a more specific exemplar justification. In other words, considering the MINORITY tonal situation in known contexts the generalization that Andalusian music is BORROWING or drawing from the minority exemplars of the music styles, pointing to them requires a more specific analogous example. I would LIKE to go with jewish examples, if I could find ANY!!!
Meanwhile, mode 3/4 (Phrygian) is focused on A LOT by the vihuela guys that chose specific parts of Motets and such of the flemish versions of the Catholic mass, regardless if based on plain chants (canto llano) or parody/cantus firmus (canto de organo) polyphony, borrowing often from popular melodies repurposed to latin mass texts. To the point they might organize extracted movements that highlight certain modes or vocal techniques, as would apply to the INSTRUMENT (like falsetas), in specific tonalities, and even have short etudes that further enhance the concept (fantasias and tientos, etc.).
By percentages, you suddenly don't need any exotic folk infusions because they intablated tons of it (phrygian based vocal music) whether sacred or secular lyrically. And I notice lyrically, the "Romances" are not "romantic", nor about knights and such, and the villancicos are NOT Christmas Carrols neither, as the previous letra proves. And considering we still have lexicon relationships to "romance, tientos, villancico, flemish aka flamenco" etc., most of the exotic outside music, really doesn't seem to help explain anything. Again, even specifics of melody, Castro Buendia snatched an endecha in Phrygian with the literal A line of verse of Polo Tobalo we know and love and link direct to flamenco traditional Phrygian song. It would require a lot of extra work to demonstrate said Endecha had Arab/Jew/Hindu/Medieval Cantiga/etc., origin, based only on the weak phrygian fetish thing.
Anyway, I take issue with some of Castro Buendia interpretation, however THAT one is a good catch on his part that SHOULD clue people in to look deeper in this area, cuz there is A LOT there.
Since you seem to agree about the sentiment of the letra I showed, it might be worth driving my point a little further with an interesting vocal thing from another song by Pedro Guerrero I came across in Fuenllana. Keep in mind, "ficta" is often a choice of the vihuela guy and not in the mensural vocal notation sources. But in one very "flamenco" sounding section in Minor key, on the Phrygian Dominant harmony we see the voice doing the infamous "hijaz" or augmented 2nd, F natural to G#, in context (or transposed C-D# in E minor). I thought I would not see that as back then singing this interval was generally avoided, yet there it is.
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
Printable Version
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread